The next day, I called Pete Sunday, knowing that I would sound at best paranoid, at worst institution-ready. I was sure the hooded figure was after us.

“If nothing was taken...”

“Nothing I know of.”

“It’s clear that somebody’s trying to scare you, Mrs. Christiansen...”

“Thea.”

“Thea, thanks. Still, I would say the same thing to you as the police down there told you about the car fire and the photographs. Yes, someone was watching you. Now, yesterday, you were alone, you were unarmed, so you were vulnerable. If...whoever it is wanted you dead, or badly hurt, you’d be dead or hurt now.”

I’d thought of the same thing. If he wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead. He could have killed us that first time he harassed us on the highway. He could have killed me in the rest area. He could have killed me here in my own driveway. He didn’t have to play games. That he was playing games meant he wanted something else, that there really was another story, no matter how adamant Stefan and Jep were. That guy had followed us down the highway from prison, and to my office, and then the cemetery and then to Black Creek again. He might even have been the one to set Stefan’s car on fire.

“True, of course. But isn’t threatening to scare somebody a crime?”

“Harassment is a crime. But it’s hard to prove, like stalking, on the basis of just a few events. Menacing is a crime of assault. But nobody has attempted to directly hurt you, correct.” He paused. “There has to be something else he wants and the big riddle is what, but the even bigger riddle is why.”

I thought the same thing. “Why me? If my son is the one who’s being warned, why scare me?”

“No idea.”

I pointed out that hearing a detective say “no idea” was not reassuring.

“I assume it has something to do with the murder, but that crime is over and Stefan has been punished. So what is the loose end?”

“You’re the detective.”

“Yes, but not a psychic.”

So I had to be content with wondering, for now. The question simmered in my mind day and night, leaving me restless, exhausted, snappish with everyone. I felt an odd foreboding, even as ordinary days slipped past, a sense of someone hunting something invisible that was hunting me too. I tried to banish the notion. It was so fanciful, so unlike me.

I found myself anxious at the thought of opening the box from Detective Sunday and so I avoided it. It left me gripped with fear. That was unlike me too. I could feel the box, under my bed, pulsing like the telltale heart.

Instead, I stacked and sorted reference materials for my new book.

I stacked and sorted them again.